Once Upon a Life: Burnt Curry and Bloody Rags

A moving memoir by one of the most highly respected and important authors from India’s Northeast.

Temsula Ao was born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat. Her happy childhood with her five siblings was cut tragically short with the deaths of both their parents. Desperately poor, emotionally scarred, lonely and often hungry, the young Temsula made up for her lack of resources with courage and determination. From these unpromising beginnings, Ao went on to build a distinguished teaching career, serving as Director of the Northeast Zone Cultural Centre, and finally Dean of the School of Humanities and Education, North- Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Temsula Ao describes the book as “an attempt to exorcise my own personal ghosts from a fractured childhood that was ripped apart by a series of tragedies… [it] is about love and what it is like to be deprived of it.”

For her readers, Ao’s memoir gives not only an insight into her role as a leading figure in the Northeast, but is also a moving account of a writerly life.